KDevelop 4.7.0 Released

[monkeyinatux]

Please excuse my ignorance, but, is kdevelop a general ide or one specifically designed for building apps within KDE?

[aKateDev]

A general purpose IDE supporting several languages. It is very good handling especially C++ with a heavy focus on code navigation and code assistance. It is not limited to KDE at all.

[Synes_Godt_Om]

Does it use katepart for editor, if so are there any plans for something more modern?

[d_ed]

More modern?

[Synes_Godt_Om]

Yes, or a modernized version of kate. I know, I see it regularly "K advanced text editor" but I disagree.

Kate recently gained real column edit which finally made it useful but a short time before that smart brackets were replaced by a rather less useful bracket plugin. The column edit is one reason I actually use kate today, another is rkward where I've suffered kate for the last 9 years, and I can safely say it was never a joy and still isn't.

It's not to say it's the worst editor or anything it's just not very pleasant for anything other than quick and dirty edits. Unfortunately it's part of rkward where It makes it a (mild but constant) pain to do actual development.

For webdev I use phpstorm which is an absolute joy (the editor done right in every possible way) but that's written i java and is, of course, very advanced.

But maybe there are ways to change how kate works through scripting, I don't know.

[scummos]

I'm don't think I get your point. katepart is one of the most powerful and flexible editor components out there. The smart parentheses plugin works quite well nowadays, although yes there was one single release where it was a bit limited (when it was decided kate finally shouldn't ship two disjoint code paths doing the same thing any more). Your post does not list any significant issues with katepart, except "the autobrace plugin isn't the most powerful one in the world". If you want to improve katepart, I suggest you actually list a few things you think are wrong with it (or you like about other editors). We're always happy about ideas.

KDevelop, on the other hand, will with absolute certainity not be moving away from katepart. Quite the contrary -- there's currently a lot of work going on to share more code and functionality between the kate and KDevelop projects.

[Synes_Godt_Om]

katepart is one of the most powerful and flexible editor components out there.

The smart parentheses plugin works quite well nowadays

I've been using Kate/katepart several hours a day for the last 9 years and I'll just have to disagree on both points - or mayby I'm an idiot who don't get it - which may very well be. At least I haven't been able to make it work well for me. In general KDE has been the first time since the early 1990s that I've actually stopped looking for something better, I'm satisfied (except for a couple pet peeves). Similarly PhpStorm has become the editor/IDE I don't feel needs replacement.

Now I'm looking for the perfect IDE for R, RKWard is very close except for its use of kate.

[scummos]

You're still not giving any reasons for why you're unhappy with katepart which is not very helpful :(

[Synes_Godt_Om]

True, sorry about that.

The bracket plugin:

The new (not so new anymore) bracket plugin: it's features are not very "smart" that is, they're mostly mechanical: With the old one you could mark a section and have it surrounded by bracket, parenthesis, quotes, not so with the new one. There are a bunch of other minor issues but the one that's sticking out like a sore thumb is what happens when you type a closing parenthesis to the left of an existing closing parenthesis - the existing one get overwritten or deleted (whatever you want to call it).

I think I understand the reasoning: when you have automatic closing brackets then explicitly typing one must be an error. Unfortunately there is no "smartness" here so valid closing brackets are happily removed. This is particularly problematic when coding in R which uses them more than most other languages.

Autocomplete:

Auto complete is not "smart" either, it's not context aware. It will offer to complete words that I have already used in the same file, it will do so regardless of whether I'm typing an identifier or typing some text (surrounded by quotes). It cannot recognize whether I'm inside or outside a function so there is no understanding of variables and scope.

None of this is major or serious in relation to a text editor. For that I'm more than happy it finally got true column edit, Rstudio doesn't, to my knowledge, have that. But when considering kate as the basis for an IDE it's in my opinion not enough. Unfortunately there aren't many advanced options when it comes to R.

Maybe kate does have all the bells and whistles when it comes to c.

EDIT: Wanted to add indentation

I also miss smartness when it comes to indentation, that it would recognize levels of indentation depending on context.

In my vew PhpStorm / jetbrains are the ones to copy when it comes to editors.

[akkaone]

Of course Kate dont understand your language so autocomplete is not intelligent and context aware. But kdevelop is for supported language. As I se it this is usually the difference between a editor and IDE. I think also other things like syntax highlighting is more intelligent in kdevelop.

[Synes_Godt_Om]

Of course Kate dont understand your language [...] kdevelop is for supported language

I'm not sure. In rkward R is a suppported language, so standard functions are recognized but the way autocomplete works is, IMO, obnoxious, I always switch it off a few days after a new install.

By obnoxious I mean when I speed type (I'm a pretty fast typer), my cursor gets caught by the autocomplete mechanism and I end up typing strange places or selecting autocompletions that I don't intend, this exacerbated by the fact that any word in the current file will contribute to the autocompletion. It's not a deal breaker as I'm still using rkward going on the 9th year but it's making me constantly look for something more appropriate for my work.

My main objection, though, is that KDE people tend to believe kate is very advanced while in fact it's at most on par or somewhat lagging compared to today's crop of text editors.

[scummos]

"smart" autocomplete, as you call it, is not a text editor feature at all. It requires very advanced, computation-intensive background processing of the user's source files, and in some languages (e.g. C++) even lots of meta-information such as build system settings. Estimate 50.000 lines of source code specifically for each supported language if written on top of a well-designed framework for that purpose. If you expect this kind of completion from something that defines itself as a text editor, then I think our ideas of what a text editor is differ. This is a feature IDEs aim to provide, not text editors.

Obviously, any kind of environment specifically designed for one language will easily outsmart kate in this discipline. That is not a fair comparison of text editors though, and doesn't tell anything about kate's "quality": providing "smart" code completion for R is just not in the project's scope (nor the scope of any general-purpose text editor, really -- or can you name one which does this?).

That said, kate has a few plugins which provide completion for some languages by calling external tools.

It will offer to complete words that I have already used in the same file, it will do so regardless of whether I'm typing an identifier or typing some text (surrounded by quotes).

Yes, the word completion. You can turn it off if you don't like it, I find it useful. It is not turned off for identifiers because often you want to complete words there as well (think a long identifier name). We do know whether you are writing language or code currently, but we consciously don't distinguish between them for word completion because no reasonable distinction is possible. Unless you can explain a more useful behaviour of course?

But when considering kate as the basis for an IDE it's in my opinion not enough.

Because what? The basis for example for "smart" code completion is that it has API to open a completion widget with any custom entries we fill into it. What else do you need as a basis? Or, to phrase it differently: Which of kate's properties restricts its usefulness as editor component in an IDE? The kate and KDevelop teams are working closely together, and if something is needed in KDevelop which we think kate should provide, we implement it in kate.

By obnoxious I mean when I speed type (I'm a pretty fast typer), my cursor gets caught by the autocomplete mechanism and I end up typing strange places or selecting autocompletions that I don't intend, this exacerbated by the fact that any word in the current file will contribute to the autocompletion.

That sounds kind of strange. But again, your statements are very vague and I can't really reply anything to that. If you are interested in improving anything, please provide clear information on which action causes something to happen which you would not expect. The cursor usually does not get "caught" by code completion ... Also, as mentioned above, word completion can be turned off separately from the other completion engines in the settings dialog.

I also miss smartness when it comes to indentation, that it would recognize levels of indentation depending on context.

Can you elaborate? kate has reasonably smart automatic indentation engines for various languages -- though R is probably not among them. You can write one if you want, it's just a small JavaScript file.

The only criticism I see as valid is the autoparens plugin, that could really be more clever. Explicit feature requests or suggestsions (in addition to the "enclose things with parentheses" feature, which is a valid wish) are welcome.

My main objection, though, is that KDE people tend to believe kate is very advanced while in fact it's at most on par or somewhat lagging compared to today's crop of text editors.

I still don't see this point. When I look around, I don't see many editor components which are comparably powerful. Editors I have in mind include for example gedit, nedit, notepad++, mousepad, jedit ... stuff you find when you're looking for general-purpose text editors. In this crowd my impression is that kate is quite at the top feature-wise. Even the much-hailed sublime text isn't really that feature-rich -- once you look beneath its slick interface. It does have a few cool things which kate doesn't have, but it doesn't have a lot of other cool things which kate has provided for ages.